Many people are blind, either from birth or resulting from an accident or illness, and are unable to read in the conventional manner. They are able to verbally communicate and can listen to recordings of great books, but they are unable to communicate in writing except by the use of braille, a system in which each character is comprised of a pattern of raised dots which are sensed by touch of the finger. The braille characters, the alphabet, numbers and punctuation, are formed by a maximum of six raised dots in two columns and three rows embossed on a sheet of paper and arranged in a rectangular cell.
Learning to read braille is difficult for many people. A blind person may learn to distinguish each character on the page, but applying any meaning to it is sometimes difficult. Visual readers can learn quickly to recognize words and grasp the meaning of a sentence at a glance, but a braille student must retain everything by memory until words and sentences are comprehended. A braille student normally requires many hours of assistance from a sighted reader to learn to translate braille characters into the spoken equivalent. That is the function of the present invention--to translate braille characters into the spoken words.
Briefly described, the invention is for a system that includes a touch pad that supports a sheet of braille characters which are to be sensed by the pressure on them. The braille sheet is identified by a bar code which is read by a code reader on the pressure pad and the braille sheet identification is applied to a program memory which provides a map location of the braille sheet and identifies each braille character as its position is touched. The microprocessor then activates a speech synthesizer which audibly pronounces the braille character.